I opened LR4, created a new catalogue. I then imported the LR3 catalogue directly to the new LR4 catalogue. The system obviously converted the LR3 catalogue on the fly. At the end of the import I got e message saying that that LightRoom couldn’t import the catalogue, but it did it and all works ok J

It does seem to solve the problem if you use the Import from another catalog function to upgrade your LR3 catalog, but keep in mind that Publish Service connections are not included in catalog import/export, so you would lose those in the transition to LR4, and would have to re-create them all from scratch.

Well, after 15 hours of running, the progress bar has moved to about 1/3rd the way and the photo count lower left in the grid indicates 14k photos. I am canceling. Basically, I cannot get LR4 to convert the catalog. I'll try one more approach. I do use publish services. flickr, smugmug, picassa, facebook. Not sure if this is part of the issue, but I really don't want to lose all this work either.

I encountered the same problem after upgrading to LR4. No images were shown when viewing All Photographs. I created a new catalog and imported from my freshly created LR4 catalog but that didn't work. I created a second new catalog but this time I chose to import from my previous LR3 catalog which did fix the problem, for now.

Just wanted to let everyone who is following this post know that I did not hear from Adobe with any further information. I was told that I would hear back by today and since they did NOT contact me I have resubmitted a request for someone to do so. I know that there are MANY people with this same issue and all I can say is that I WILL update this post as SOON as I hear anything.

Until then a GREAT workaround with the EXACT steps were posted by richardondrovic .

Thanks zdybkela, just FYI, the workaround does not work for me. I ran for over 15 hours and only processed 15k images. I cannot get the old catalog to import. The main problem appears to be that when the catalog gets converted, it does not create all of the previews.

UPDATE........I spoke to adobe this morning and they have an engineer still working on this issue! They are monitoring this forum post so instead of calling them with this same issue it would be better to post here that you are having the same problem.

This is in fact a bug with LR4 and hope to see it fixed SOON......As I said above there is a great workaround posted by richardondrovic.

That does work to solve the original issue but it comes at the cost of your Publish Services as they are not included in catalog export/import. Just keep that in mind before you proceed.

zdybkela wrote:

UPDATE........I spoke to adobe this morning and they have an engineer still working on this issue! They are monitoring this forum post so instead of calling them with this same issue it would be better to post here that you are having the same problem.

This is in fact a bug with LR4 and hope to see it fixed SOON......As I said above there is a great workaround posted by richardondrovic.

Well, it is also working for some folks, but not me. I am on my 5th attempt to import the catalog to a new LR4 catalog. I have made it through importing 15k images. My current import has been running for 9 hours and imported 2500 images. At this rate, I need 99 more hours to complete importing of my measley 45k image catalog. This is horrible. The issue appears to be with the previews somehow and I suspect that once previews are actually built or copied that they are not indexed correctly and that somehow the import is doing a table scan before it actually adds each record. Like I said, I'm glad it works for others, but 100 hours to lose all my published information.....It's really sad that my LR3 catalog converted rather quickly and all the images are there along with the publish information. You can see the counts, just no previews and no images.

Well I attempted to contact Adobe again today through Chat. They had me create a small LR3 Catalog of 600 photos, then export that catalog, then import that catalog to LR4. Once it worked the chat person basically wiped his hands of any issue, indicated it is not a software problem and told me it was a performance issue. Suggested I reduce the size of my catalog. I respectfully disagree, but am appalled that Adobe basically has no upgrade path for a 45k image catalog and their solution is break the catalog into tiny pieces. Not really sure what that solves. It certainly does not help me given that I use LR to publish all my stuff. I also use LR to create collages which if things are in different catalogs becomes a pain. Really cannot understand why 45k images is such an issue. Photoshop Elements handled the volume without issue. When I asked whether the failed conversion from LR3 to LR4 was a bug, the answer I received was that we were able to convert your new catalog no problem...... Not really sure if they are just overwhelmed or not, but this is rediculous answer. I have spent in excess of 60 hours attempting workarounds to convert my catalog with no answer from Adobe and no answer that works. I'd be willing to lose all my publish information to be able to convert. I suspect I will have to export my existing catalog into 5 or 6 other minor catalogs and then attempt to import each of those. The problem with this approach is that the import function takes upwards to 8 hours or more to check for duplicate images once the catalog starts to grow and I cannot get the initial import to complete. I'm basically dead in the water until Adobe fixes the conversion issue that leaves me unable to view the photos.

Try quitting Lightroom, throwing out the preference files, and relaunching lightroom. Let me know if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, it would be very helpful if someone could provide a catalog (the upgraded LR4 catalog) that is exhibiting the problem. Only the catalog is necessary, not the photos. The catalog can be zipped to make it smaller, and can be uploaded to Dropbox or a similar service, and you can then provide a link to it here. Or, if you prefer, I can provide instructions for sending the catalog directly to me at Adobe via FTP.

I have been on the phone with Adobe for over FIVE hours now and did try what you mentioned. I have talked with support and escalated support and now I am sitting stagnant waiting for a call back that I was promised by last Friday......Still NO call or NO resolution.

Contact me directly and I would be glad to send my catalog to have it looked at.

When LR converts a catalog it attempts to copy the previews without question and does not give an option to "not copy" the previews. There is an error routine that keeps tracks of what previews could not be found and therefore not copied forward during conversion. This error routine crashes LR because it cannot handle any substantial amount of mismatches. Somewhere north of 3000 image previews not found. I can repeat this easily by exporting more than 3000 images from my LR3 catalog for items that no longer have previews available. In the automated catalog conversion, the previews not found is ignored (most likely because it never asked if I wanted previews copied forward) The catalog conversion works fine, but somewhere in the preview crashing, the catalog is left in a state that does not allow the regular images of the catalog to be viewed. I can prove this.

I was successful today in first exporting my LR3 Catalog without copying previews. This took all of 2 minutes or so. I then created a new empty LR4 Catalog and then immediately imported my recently exported LR3 catalog. Again, about 5 minutes to convert to LR4 and all images visible no issues; other than, I lost all of my published collection information. I am currently rebeuilding that. Most of my publish collections use jfriedl plugins, so really not a big deal to rebuild except for Smugmug.

The SmugMug plugin allows you to sync what is online with the catalog, but it presents potential matches....1 at a time. I get at least two potential matches on almost every photo. One that is an exact match with the jpg version of the file and then a potential match with the NEF. Unfortunately, I have to tell the plug in to accept the "Perfect" match, 1 at a time. I have 10k images at Smugmug. So, once again, I can either switch to jfriedl's plugin for SmugMug or work my way through 10k photos 1 at a time.....At least I am working in LR4 now. Still no reasonable answer from Adobe. They blame the plugins and publish services and basically offered no help to retain publish information intact. Very disappointed with their support on this and not really sure why we have to trouble shoot this for them. Perhaps they tested everything with < 500 images or with something that had recent previews all available. I delete previews after 30 days. The first thing they asked me to do was create a small catalog then convert it. Once that worked, they basically wiped their hands of the issue and stated the software is working correctly and everything else is just performance issues. Honestly, they must not know what the issue is or don't care. I also offered to troubleshoot it for them.

Benjamin, I have a 45k image catalog. I attempted to delete the preference file. Happy to send you the catalog for troubleshooting if you provide the upload information. Please see my other post on where I believe the issue to be.

The issue is with the "rendered" previews. Not with the smaller sizes from inside LR. The error routine that is "Counting" not found previews is the one that rebuilds the "Preview Data" My catalog is working fine now and I specifically requested on export not to copy previews.

The issue is with the "rendered" previews. Not with the smaller sizes from inside LR. The error routine that is "Counting" not found previews is the one that rebuilds the "Preview Data" My catalog is working fine now and I specifically requested on export not to copy previews.

All the previews, of all sizes, are rendered from inside of LR. I delete all my 1:1s after 7 days, probably had only a few percent of them when I upgraded (out of over 100,000), and the upgrade went smoothly.

I have been able to reproduce this problem using Kevin's (zdybkela's) catalog. I've entered the issue in our bug database, so an engineer will be looking at it as soon as possible. I'll post back to this thread when I have more info.

After reading your post, I decided to try an experiment. I went back to my LR3 catalog and deleted all the 1:1 previews. I moved the catalog into a new directory so there was no preview folder hoping it would force LR4 to create all new previews. . I opened the catalog in LR4 and it asked if I wanted to convert the catalog. I went ahead (118k images) and it converted the catalog. Exactly the same issue as before, can't see images in parent folders with more than about >3k images. I also have lots of galleries on SmugMug I am not willing to recreate.

Very annoyed. I have same issue here with a catalog of >80,000 images. "No Photos in Selected Folder" for every folder I select, parent, child, and All Photos.

Quality control at Adobe is obviously slipping.

Well, I tried all suggestions and experments mentioned, and closest I got after many wasted hours of fiddling was with re-importing a converted catalog into a new one, but that broke all stacked photos apart. MAJOR FAIL.

I noticed that you said you can't see any previews at all even if you click on child folders. Is that accurate In my case I can see the photos if I click in the child folder. Early in my catalog, I have only jpegs but a few years in, I started shooting raw+jpegs on Nikon. It's in those parent folders that the problem start. I'm running LR4 on Win 7 x64 on a custom Intel PC with 24GB RAM with 6tb RAID5 array. Catalog sits on a Crucial 240gb SSD.

For me, I was not able to see previews for any photo in the main catalog except for photos in publish collections, I was able to see all of those. I'm running LR4 on Win 7 x64 custom Intel 16gb RAM. Catalog and images are on E drive (1 TB Internal HDD). Operating system and programs are on C (Crucial 256gb SSD). All of this was on another machine and moved to this machine, but all moves of images performed in LR, not through the OS. I suspect that the export in the conversion routine from LR3 to LR4 catalog is filling up the error table for previews not found and rather than crashing, is most likely overwriting storage somewhere creating unpredictable results, or that another process proceeds while the error processing is still writing, but without knowing how those routines work, I'm just guessing. I can consistently prove that LR3 crashes on export of the catalog for anything North of say about 3500 images. However, LR4 does not crash when converting same catalog. If I do an export for LR3 and unselect the "Copy Preview" option, no crash and import/conversion to LR4 is successful.

Same here Firillu, it did not matter for me how many photos in folders, none showed up with the exception of the publish services. All the publish services would show the photos, the main folder would not at any level.

Okay, I deleted all my 1:1 previews in LR3 cat. Then I created a new cat in LR4 and imported from cat3. It didn't take that long (1-2 hours) All 90k+ images are now visable in all folders and sub-folders including 'All Photographs'

All the keywords, develop settings, crops, flags, etc. seem to be intact.

True, the publish services is not set up.

Didn't we have to do something like this when converting LR2 to LR3? I remember it wasn't a simple task as it was supposed to be.